Desmond MandersonUniversité Nationale d'Australie – Canberra Spécialiste du rapport entre le droit et les arts du visuel.

 

Klimt's Jurisprudence

 

This seminar develops an extended analysis of Gustav Klimt’s lost masterpiece, Jurisprudence, bringing it into a richer dialogue with its social and legal context.  Jurisprudence, a suffering naked man surrounded by eyes, eerily captures the relationship between ‘sovereignty and bare life’ that Agamben argues was re-forged and refined across the twentieth-century. Klimt’s image might perhaps be regarded as the very first, and perhaps still the most comprehensive, representation of this profoundly important figure of legal modernity. But Klimt does not merely exemplify Agamben’s force field of jurisprudential violence; he also complicates and interrogates it. Drawing on two of the most important cultural events to take place in Vienna at the time—the first performance of Aeschylus’ Oresteia; and the first publication of Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams—we develop three distinct readings of the painting’s relationship between man, law, and sovereignty. Like an optical illusion, Klimt’s painting hovers uncertainly between three different but equally necessary perspectives: law as it is (the social); law as we imagine it (the philosophical); and law as it might be (the political). The name for the highly charged study of their relationship is jurisprudence.

 

Deuxième séance du séminaire de Emanuele Conte :

Public-privé : une frontière floue entre la force de l'état et l'autonomie des individus.

Séminaire de droit et sciences humaines et sociales – CENJ

salle 8, 105 bd Raspail, Mardi 4 Novembre 2014, 18h à 21h